Topic: Bitcoinica - Advanced Bitcoin Trading Platform - page 17. (Read 51103 times)

Hmmm.

I funded my account with at BTC transfer.

The first thing I did was to see if tops worked on the buy side.  I set a buy stop for a few cents above the current price.  Fortunatly the market went up and sure enough, I made a purchase and lost a few cents as anticipated.

Then Bitcoinica whined about a negative USD balance and offered to settle from BTC.  Settled to zero USD.  Fine.

I then (ignorantly in retrospect) decided that it would be good to have some USD to avoid that hassle going forward.  I tried the big red 'sell' button which I thought was a market order.  That seemed to do nothing except result in some more losses and again a negative USD to settle.

I then tried a limit sell below market price.  That kept some trade active (and losing money) and when I canceled it I am again underwater in USD and need to settle.

Then I read various FAQ's and such and seem to discover that I am trying to pound a square peg into a round hole by trying to get a positive USD balance and that Bitcoinica can (or will) only perform this action to zero an account.

In the end, it seems that if I don't care to use anyone's money but my own, and if I get nicked a few percentage points to put in a bid (and another few percentage point to cancel it) then it is not really what I happen to need at this time for my purposes.

I'm not sure I fully understand what you mean, but: setting up stop/limit orders costs nothing. You only pay when they get executed, and then you're (roughly) certain they're executed at the price you set (unless a huge sell-off takes place).

I like to both splay out a trades over a range, and also move them around regularly depending on changes in market depth and times and such.  These adjustments cost nothing on an exchange.  It seems from my brief experiments with Bitcoinica that every adjustment one makes results in a pretty hefty fee.  Am I mis-interpreting something about this do you think?

I thought this first too, but it depends. When there are really strong walls on either side of the price, I've actually seen a spread of 0.01 in bitcoinica. But when the price is changing fast, and the walls are far away, the spread is of course larger.

If you're trading with ~10 bitcoins or something in that order, it is indeed better to trade by hand or bot. There's usually some buy/sell wall close together of 10 BTC. But for 100 BTC, it's comparable to the market (plus a bit of markup).

Never mind on the question (about Bitcoinica...but I'm still interested in the address...)  After reading some of the material, I see the answer.

My main interest was in the stop loss to give me greater comfort in strategies on other exchanges.  But the spreads are to high.  Since I never had any interest in using margin and can self fund 100%, it seems that I am much better off writing a simple bot for this purpose.

Spending a little time and a few buck playing around with Bitcoinica was well worth it in helping me understand the mechanics of things.

The tips are helpful and highly appreciated.  Enough so that I'd send yo Libertarian ass a BTC if you mention what kind of a special address starts with a '9' char.  I couldn't figure it out with a cursory bit of searching.

QQ:  Is it undoable (and unnecessary) to convert some of the BTC I put in into USD?  Is it the norm for someone who deals exclusively with BTC to just let Bitcoinica settle negative USD balances (from losses) to zero?

I have accrued some losses in simply trying several attempts to sell BTC in order to have some USD balance in case I needed it...frick'n spreads take a bite!   I seem to dimly remember something about 'Bitcoinica is not a trading house' or something like that and I am now wondering if that is what they were talking about.

I finally decided that if I continue to play around with Bitcoin trading, even if it is just for accumulation, I should learn to leverage some of the features of Bitcoinica.  It is hard not to be impressed by the professionalism and skill displayed by Zhoutong over these last few months so while I will as with any other Bitcoin outfit trust them with as little as possible, I am confident enough to have an account and possibly a fair amount of value in it on a transient basis.

I played around with stop orders and lost close to the precise amount of money I expected to...around two cents

Several things of note:

I was under the impression that I needed an Mt. Gox account for some reason.  Something about redemption codes or some such.  Not having been an Mt. Gox customer (again until last night) I did not really understand what they were and didn't feel like trying to.  But it seems that I had a misconception about the necessity of having an Mt. Gox account.  It seems like I can both add and withdraw BTC to arbitrary addresses though I have only tried the former as I write this.

I seem to have been 'blessed' with 5:1 margin unless I am reading the UI wrong.  I actually think that it is good practice to start people out with something lower if it is easy to set it to whatever the customer wishes.  (If as a customer, I wish to be suicidal and can do so without risk to Bitcoinica, so be it.)  In order to thwart those who would game the Bitcoinica user base, a good policy might even be to set the margin ratio randomly.

I did not feel comported by several pieces of text that I found:

  "Why not place an order now?"

  "If you just want to make some quick bucks in the hot market, Bitcoinica is definitely for you!"

  "What are you waiting for?"

I think that the Bitcoin economy needs a professional no-bullshit platform in order to have a hope being a usable economy (because it is natively volatile and unstable as a currency at this time) and Bitcoinica has some real potential to take an unassailable lead here.  I guess that is why the text I have mentioned bothers me personally just a bit.  But I'm no marketing guru.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/announcement-bitcoinica-changes-default-leverage-to-251-for-everyone-52092

I see the leverage has been halved. Does that mean the number of shorts are straining the system?  ... sounds bullish.

At this time, if your also sorted by price whenever the user clicked the active/cancel column, this will help enormously today (even if you are releasing a new interface next month).

I think a manual payout queue would be a good thing to integrate into the withdrawal system if it fails to automate withdrawals.

Hi zhoutong, thanks for withdrawing my money for me!
I am very glad that you are moving.  Please urge tradehill to make codes though. It's such a no-brainer.

It's bad for them anyway.

People want to trade on Mt. Gox, that's why they withdraw from Bitcoinica. No one can benefit from funds being stuck between two platforms.

Trading on Mt. Gox, they receive 0.6% fees; but trading on Bitcoinica, they can only receive 0.26% (the fee tier we're at).

The withdrawal limit may be troublesome, but it has never limited Bitcoinica's growth. To put it simple, less withdrawals = less business for Mt. Gox.

In the future, we will try not to rely on this single exchange.

Shame on mtgox for not doing anything for one of their biggest customers.

They are very different.

We're limited by what Mt. Gox allows us to do. We don't even have an official partnership with them. So basically we have the same withdrawal limits.

You can send a support ticket to us and we will withdraw for you manually if automatic withdrawal fails.

For both technical and security reasons, we can't set up automatic withdrawals from our hedging account at the moment. Sorry for the inconvenience.

It seems a simple SQL statement select where active order by price.

Anyway, looking forward to the new features.

As for withdrawls, I wasn't able to withdrawl gox codes, but bitcoin withdrawls hit the p2p network instantaneously.

It's really a good idea and we have actually considered the "price ladder" view.

However, we may not launch this feature in the next release because we want to integrate with order entry directly. You will be able to edit your orders in-line, and control all your trades using a single price line.

Our current focus is a much better front-end experience. The next release will make everything refresh-free with a even more intuitive interface, including notifications and real-time order entry.

I heard from Mt. Gox that they are implementing a sub-account feature. Our withdrawal will be completely smooth after they have this feature. Now we have different accounts for hedging and withdrawals, and as required, the hedging account is "verified". However, the withdrawal account is still limited since we can't verify them with the same identity. We can't allow withdrawals from hedging account for both technical and security reasons.

If you ever have problems with withdrawals, just submit a support ticket to us. We will help you withdraw within 2-12 hours.

Mt. Gox BTC code should be working fine, and BTC withdrawals are 100% available.

Hi again and thanks for your responses. I'm not sure I understand maintenance as I can't match it up with real numbers, but it's close enough, and I get the idea.

I'd like to propose a suggestion to your order reporting. I would like to see all of the active orders sorted by price. I'm currently doing that manually, but it would be nice if your interface provided this view (even better if it graphically displayed them above the weekly chart, but I ask too much). Something like: